Thursday, July 21, 2022
8:25 a.m. Okay, guys, ready if you are. FRCP.
[The drumming question yesterday was, “How can we connect with earth energies in a productive way?”
[I got:
[Be willing to forward the greater good, not just your idea of the greater good. Be willing to do or think or feel things that “don’t make sense,” and see what happens. Trust that you and the world are one; trust your instincts. Learn from what happens. Don’t think it’s up to you to make the sun come up.]
What you got during yesterday’s drumming is not to be heard and forgotten, but borne in mind. Not that we are saying you don’t, just that it is easy to forget.
Continuity is terribly hard for me. I suppose that is why I have kept writing in journals all my adult life. It wasn’t so much what I was writing as that I was writing. But still, so much of my life is a disconnected series of islands. I get the sense that this is not everyone’s experience.
No, but it is common enough among a certain type of person. Overhead, you might call it, or a cost of doing business in just the way you live.
A connection between living in the moment and a sort of on-going amnesia? Or, that isn’t right, a connection not with amnesia but a very unusual memory functioning?
There is little point in discussing your “coin has to drop into the slot for the memory to be accessible” experience. Some people, observing you, have concluded that you just don’t pay attention. Others, that you are in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
Which would be more convincing as a diagnosis, if it hasn’t been going on for so many decades, and/or hadn’t been so uneven.
You had forgotten until just now, but Rita asked us about your memory problem nearly 20 years ago, and we said you don’t have a memory problem, you had an access problem.
I don’t remember any practical follow-up.
From our end, the practical follow-up was to let us sketch a model of memory between non-3D (where memories reside) and 3D (where specific brain cells may provide access to certain of those memories).
That must have been in the 2004 sessions in the black box, which I never transcribed, I think. I sort of remember Rita asking it and Skip later saying that he had expected a different answer from what we got.
In any case, the important thing is that the way anyone experiences interaction with the 3D would be different, either noticeably or not so noticeably. But “different” clearly can’t mean “malfunctioning,” unless you believe that everybody else is out of step.
Isn’t that what we usually do conclude?
Yes, if you don’t mind being convicted out of your own mouth.
I’m used to it. But let’s talk more about continuity as a problem. I imagine it is everybody’s problem, to varying degrees.
You’ve heard us say it, many times. It is inherent in 3D conditions, the relative isolation of the current moment from those beforehand. It is what allows you to live.
What was the side-trail I just glimpsed as we wrote that?
We won’t go into it, lest we lose what we intend to get across, but it was an insight that people who experience the present as too intermingled with other times may have a very hard time staying oriented in the world.
ADHD? Autism?
As we said, we don’t want to go into it, at the moment. Perhaps some other time.
So – continuity?
Your continuity – anyone’s – proceeds along lines of interest. This will be obvious after a moment’s thought.
If I were interested in cars, I’d remember every car I ever owned?
That’s a different form of continuity of interest. Call it
Sorry, lost the thread.
You began to worry about why you find the journal’s blue lines harder to follow.
Well, I did, because I do. I’ve been noticing it for some time now. But let’s stay on track. If possible!
In your specific case, you are vitally interested in certain aspects of history, for reasons you never really investigated, because the fact of the interest was so self-evident.
And others might have a passion for something from an early age, and consider that passion a part of who they were.
Yes. People with a passion that is easily converted into a way to make a living call it a vocation – literally, a calling. But it is very possible – common, in fact – to have a vocation that has nothing to do with career. Stamp collectors, for instance, or any hobbyists whose hobby is a passion, fit into the example. There is no money, no prestige, no creativity, perhaps, in collecting stamps. (That is, there need not be; certainly there can be.) But the passion may nonetheless be powerful and satisfying.
Our point is that – in yet another realm – your lives are not primarily rational, despite what the social sciences may think. Primarily, you express what you are, and most of that may be entirely unknown to you. Obsessive interests are one manifestation of the fact, and of course, there is nothing wrong with the fact! Life is not malfunctioning. You as individuals or as collectives are not malfunctioning. You are expressing your nature as 3D allows it to express. How can this be “wrong” or mistaken?
Now, you see, you may experience great difficulties in remembering something that happened just yesterday, yet remember clearly some historical fact or set of facts. You may lose sight of people in your life – perhaps for months or years at a time – yet be genuinely glad when they resurface, and perhaps surprised that you could have let them slip out of sight. Similarly, you may be deeply interested in a given subject (mental, physical, whatever) and then wake up, so to speak, and realize that you haven’t thought about it in years. What kind of continuity is that? Is any of that?
Yet I get that you are going to say that it is.
You must remember that you are always on the move. Continuity comes via your non-3D component that is not being pulled and hauled to every latest moment.
You’re going to need to explain that. I know you’re meaning one thing, but the words themselves are saying something else.
Suggesting, you mean. Very well, your non-3D is and is not being pulled and hauled to every new present moment you experience in 3D. It is, because it is tethered to your experiences, and you can only experience life sequentially. It is not, in that your non-3D does not identify with each moment in the way your 3D mind tends to do. In saying that the mind is in the non-3D and the brain, only, in 3D, we are guilty of distorting things a little. Think of your 3D functioning as a local terminal of a larger computer, and you may get a better sense of it.
And I get that now you are looking at the subject from yet another viewpoint.
We are adding in the concept of “the times,” for just as “the times” allow certain kinds of energy to enter 3D and inhibit others, so they interact with your daily life. Surely this is obvious once stated. The energies activated in the early 1940s were not all about World War II, but they did all share certain characteristics. Say, they all had to pass through certain filters. In not taking into account the fact that every day is different, psychology overlooks a key variable in your lives. Conscious and unconscious continually interact, but the invisible third player is “the times,” limiting what kind of things may pass across the filter.
So if we move from A to B in our lives, partly it is our own conscious or unconscious decision, but partly it is the times.
Don’t you experience life that way, once you see it? You can’t experience life in just the way you did in the 1990s, no matter how clear your memories or how consistent your intent. You are, in important ways, not that person, and also you do continue to be that person.
A psychoactive drug may allow us to relive those moments.
It is the difference between snapshots, even vivid ones, and the thing itself. A person reliving a moment is reliving it in the present moment, which by definition is a later point in his or her life.
Call this one “Continuity”?
Perhaps “Continuity (1)” as there is much more to say. That is not a guarantee that it will get said, of course.
Our thanks as always for all this.